It's the subtitle that will doubtless deter pc history departments from recommending the first of Morris's splendid Pax Britannica trilogy to students. Imperial is not a popular word these days, though I can still remember the ornate duck-egg blue Imperial Bank of India cheque book my Burmese mother kept in her drawer. She wouldn't have liked Heaven's Command because she loved the Raj. Morris doesn't, but neither does she condemn British colonialism out of hand. This is a cool, dry, carefully considered, often irreverent long view of the 60 years between Queen Victoria's accession in 1837 and her Diamond Jubilee, the golden age, give or take the odd setback, of empire.

Lord Carnarvon, Disraeli's colonial secretary, nicknamed Twitters, "had at first found it difficult to understand what imperialism meant. Later he sorted it out in his mind and cogently explained it to others. There were two kinds of imperialism, he said. There was the false kind, Caesarism, despotism, and there was the British kind – a worldwide trust, keeping the peace, elevating the savage, relieving the hungry and uniting the loyalty of all the British people overseas. Imperialism certainly entailed expansionism, but it was not bullying expansionism. It was merely the extension of British institutions and wholesome influences, if necessary by force." Well said, Twitters – got it in one. I especially like the "merely". Only an eminent Victorian could call the wholesale transportation to far-flung colonial settlements in Canada, Africa, India and Australasia of old Harrovians, Anglicanism, the British army and afternoon tea as "mere".

Now, about those setbacks. Morris's easy, elegant prose changes gear when disasters loom: disasters such as the British retreat from Kabul after the first Afghan war, described by historian Sir John Kaye as "the most terrible in the history of British arms and a completion of a tragedy whose awful completeness was unexampled in the history of the world". Of the 16,500 terrified, starving, freezing souls who straggled out of the Afghan capital on 6 January 1842, only one made it to the safety of Jalalabad 90 miles away. The rest were massacred by tribesmen. There were equally gory engagements during the Indian uprising and the Zulu wars. But there were high points too: the Great Exhibition, Stanley finding Dr Livingstone, thousands of miles of transcontinental railways trumpeting the supremacy of British steel and steam. And best of all are the characters, heroes, villains, eccentrics, epitomised by Lord "Peccavi" Napier, victor of Sindh, who made his own spectacles. The British empire definitely had its moments.

The Making of Modern Britain, written and read by Andrew Marr (7hrs abridged, Macmillan, £16.99)

Seamlessly – well, almost – picking up the historical baton where Morris left off, Marr's book, spun from his recent television series, takes us from Victoria's death in 1901 to VE Day. Two world wars, the abdication, the birth of socialism, feminism, fascism, Hollywood, package holidays, cornflakes – it's a rich seam, but possibly overmined, even by someone as engaging and well informed as Marr.

It wasn't an empire in Roman, Mongolian or British terms of permanence and civilisation, but the Vikings who rowed in open boats to their settlements in North America and Russia, Iceland and Byzantium were surely the world's toughest expansionists. History, culture, exploits, mythology, it's all here.